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A few thoughts on Halo CE

Recently I went through and played Halo CE again.
I wanted to see if my thoughts of Halo CE would be different now than it was when I was younger, the last time I went through the whole campaign was when I was 13 I think (20 now).

When I was a child I felt this game was amazing, the story was great, the flood was scary and awesome, and such. I didn't really pay attention to the music, or even the story(I thought the story was just fighting aliens, and I thought chief was a robot)
Have my opinions changed? Yes, in someways.
This time I played with all my focus and attention. I was paying attention to story, music, level design, weapons, and what it felt like to fight the enemy.

So here are my thoughts on different aspects.

Story: is pretty shallow, but it does what it needs to do. My only gripe was that certain things didn't make since, I didn't really have questions about the Halo ring, but more about the Marines, and why they did stuff.

Music: Is great, and blends well with what is going on, it can even seem as if it is fading into the background, which is probably why I didn't notice it much as a kid. (Side not: I felt they used music at times to make up for a shallow story, because it seemed really loud during dialog)
Weapons: Bungie made each weapon have a unique purpose and experience while using it. They accomplished this really well. Every weapon feels very different, this is an aspect that wasn't paid attention to much in later games, now we have 8 of the same weapon with for different factions.

Levels: the first half of the game feels good. Some are very large, and can be explored, some are smaller, but feels good for the gameplay. Silent cartographer is, to me, the level that has all of Halo best level design. Assault on control room(without the flood) is kinda bipolar, it has a lot of repeating small rooms, and bridges which makes it not fun, but it gets better when the level opens up. Every mission after this isn't that good in terms of level design, because it has a lot of small quarters that are repeated quite a bit(library).

Flood: they feel they were introduced in s great way. You understood that this was threat, but it was mysterious. It accomplished that. The story made them scary, and the gameplay did as well. They are scary in gameplay only because they are overly difficult, even on normal. They are highly accurate, and they are relentless is shooting you. There aren't many weapons good against them, and you can't melee them, which makes them an annoying opponent. They game makes you afraid of them, but only because they are too difficult to fight. This is good, because the game wanted you to be afraid, but it also wasn't that fun on higher difficulties, so their should have been a balance of it. The later half of the game is mostly fighting the flood, and so it wasn't as fun to me, and I a few times considered just stopping, but I didn't.

So I still love the game, but I understand it isn't perfect. It has a lot of good ideas that were executed well, and other good ideas that weren't. Future games built on it and brought a lot of what made it good, dropped the bad, but also left behind certain things that made it great(I.e. unique purpose and experience of every weapon idea left behind.)
I still love Halo: CE. This is all my opinion, and I understand and respect if you disagree, so what do you think about what I have said?